


Grow Up

by fourgetregret (ryry_peaches)



Category: Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Drabble, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 02:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13331208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryry_peaches/pseuds/fourgetregret
Summary: Oliver's thoughts behindgrow up.  I'll see you at midnight.





	Grow Up

**Author's Note:**

> I bought CMBYN on a whim because I knew it was popular amongst my fellow Gays. Within minutes of finishing it had the movie up online. They're both absolutely lovely; I haven't been so enamored with a story in a very long time, and I'll admit it's reached a slightly ridiculous level of obsession.
> 
> I didn't tag this story as underage in the warnings because if you're here in the Elio/Oliver tags then I assume you already know.
> 
> EDIT: I forgot to post the disclaimer (oops!) but as you know, these characters and several references in this story belong to the inimitable André Aciman. I'm just playing with them!

_I don’t want to linger too much on the past; sometimes remembering hurts, knowing how time had us in a chokehold. The few weeks we finally had were the shortest and best of my life. I can’t help but ask this, though (and please don’t read into my wondering any sense of insecurity; you know for a fact that I’m insecure): you wrote, that morning, “Grow up.” It stung me, I can now admit. Were you attempting to bring levity to an intense situation? Could you feel me vibrating with wanting from a room away and wanted to knock me down, like you do everything: coolly?_

I put down Elio’s letter. He’d spoken of college applications, and tacked a perfunctory “my parents send their love” onto the end, and it was really quite an ordinary letter from Elio, except for that one paragraph, the one that seemed to pop off the page, at once accusing and withdrawing. Elio, the paradox that he was, writing the way he had spoken the summer before, with sharp edges that pulled back at the last minute: _it’s your fault!_ immediately followed by _I’m sorry._

_Grow up_ had never been a jibe. It had been a plea, God, Elio, it was a plea, how did you not see that? Grow up, in the next fifteen hours, grow up and be twenty-four and make this okay. More okay. Grow up so I'm not your first, because I can't handle the responsibility, because I don't believe I'm good enough for you and that doesn't stop me from wanting you. If you can't be twenty-four, if that’s too much of a miracle to ask, then just be eighteen, or nineteen, just graduate high school. Grow up enough that I can sleep at night after fucking my fist to thoughts of you, grow up so that wanting you won't become a scar on my conscience in the shape of your mouth open and head back in my nighttime fantasies.

 _Midnight._ The witching hour. The time of fairy tale magic, maybe at midnight if I say just the right thing to you the curse that has crossed our stars will break and if you can't grow up then I'll shrink down, Elio, I'll be seventeen and stumbling, virginal, I’ll share the innocence of youth with you and together we can revel in the first touch of another man, and my hands won't be smooth and ink-stained on your shoulders. Better yet I'll be sixteen; let you bear the responsibility of being worshipped by a younger boy, let you do the worrying because you are great at worrying and the dams of my anxieties are breaking, Elio, I can't keep my inhibitions up much longer and I already know that if you show up tonight, and you will, _you will,_ you will leave in the morning with a sore ass and stumbling legs and hopefully you won’t regret it. I would die if you regret anything we do.

And an imperative, my final holdout: grow up, be more mature than I am. Be smarter without a high school diploma than I will probably ever be and don't show up. Grow up, Elio, realize what a terrible idea it would be for us to sleep together. Surely you’re old enough and smart enough to realize that we can’t do this? And you would have responded with your head tilted, maybe grabbing me, “surely I’m old enough and smart enough to know what I want.”

But I couldn’t say all of that, no matter how much I wanted to. It would kill the both of us, to put the ache of lust back in our bodies but be unable to do a damn thing about it. In another lifetime, the lifetime where Elio had grown up in the span of fifteen hours, we could have spent the whole lifetime together, we could have taken a hundred honeymoons in Rome. I could have found a way to fight off everyone who would tear us apart; I would have done anything, if the odds had been tipped just the smallest fraction in our favor, to spend all my remaining time with the magical boy, _Jew of discretion_ who had been half-wild in a peach-sweet way.

I reached into my desk drawer and found a clean sheet of college-ruled paper, and began:

_Dearest Oliver_

But no, no, I couldn’t indulge, no matter how I ached to.

Better for Elio not to be teased with references to time gone by. _Tis better to have loved and lost,_ the Bard had written, but loss demands recovery. It would be monstrous of me to reopen a wound that could be nearly scarred over by now.

I scribbled out my name completely, leaving an angry cloud of black ink in its place, and wrote again:

_Dearest Elio,_

_I was begging you._

_Is that the answer you hoped for?_

_Give my love to your parents --_

_\-- and all the rest to yourself,_

_Oliver_


End file.
